Two privacy watchdogs, one in the US and one in the UK, have filed legal actions against their respective governments, petitioning them to curtail - or at minimum uncover - their domestic surveillance operations.

Edward Snowden's leaks have alerted the world to a serious issue: the extent of government spying in societies that supposed themselves to be free. That does not, however, mean that every word he says to Glenn Greenwald is news.

Technion, the blogger who recently turned up an undocumented back door in HP's StoreOnce, has turned up similar issues in other HP products - publicised on support forums by the company, but unnoticed at the time.

After recent revelations about governments snooping on their own citizens, it's nice to know that not every such effort is going smoothly, as India’s much criticised NSA-style Centralised Monitoring System (CMS) is facing big delays after it emerged that the project is still missing the vital software which will allow analysts to search comms data.

Greedy daredevil set to use about 0.01% of annual space+science consumption

A British boffinry organisation has issued a stinging rebuke to an American daredevil who plans to cross the Atlantic in a small boat suspended beneath a huge cluster of helium balloons - somewhat in the style of cartoon flying house eldster-quest aerial battle movie Up.

If you're willing to have a film Director say “Cut!”, the op will be free

Mark this one down in your diaries, Reg readers: October 18th is the first World Vasectomy Day, and if you're game you'll be able to get the snip for free by agreeing to have the operation streamed online.

Butlers, maids, servants, nurses etc. Assassins or police, not so much

Robot relationship experts believe they have cracked the difficult question of how to make humans get along with mechanical beings. Their answer? ﻿﻿Ask not what you can do for your robot, but what your robot can do for you.

The main drawback of folk thinking you know more than the average person in the street about digital kit is the inevitable stream of requests from friends, relatives and people you’ve slept with to suggest the ideal new phone for them come upgrade time.

The much-derided venture capitalist can be a useful accelerant for the startup that uses the cash wisely. No matter how good your product, without the right amount of investment you won't be able to scale up product design, research and marketing to the point where you can attract the really big customers, hire the best engineers and source the best components.

Computer glitches in the UK's air traffic control system have restricted the number of flights over the south of England. It's reported thousands of passengers and holidaymakers face delays thanks to the technology gremlins.

Perennially almost-but-not-quite failing Overland Storage is once again under notice from Nasdaq that it might be booted out of the stock exchange after apparently falling short of the "minimum market value" required.

Amazon has brought resource-level permissions to its main compute and database services, allowing businesses to pick and choose individual staffers' level of access to specific servers or databases. The move is aimed at enterprises that need to enforce stringent identity and access management policies.

French internet users need no longer fear having their connections cut off under strict France's Hadopi copyright infringement law, after the government's Constitutional Council on Friday ruled that portion of the much-criticized law to be unconstitutional.

After battling it out in the courts for more than two years, Apple has dropped its lawsuit against Amazon over the e-commerce giant's use of the term "app store", claiming legal measures are no longer necessary.

The Xen Project, which is now part of the Linux Foundation and which is responsible for extending the open source virtualization hypervisor formerly controlled by Citrix Systems, has updated Xen with a new 4.3 release that brings it to ARM processors.

By 2020 NASA aims to have a next-generation Curiosity rover on Mars to search for signs of organisms that could have lived on the Red Planet, and to collect a cache of deep-drilled rock samples for eventual analysis back here on Earth.

Feedback from industry groups and educators on the latest draft curriculum for teaching computing in Australia doubts whether the nation's schools, and teachers, are ready to teach a proposed new Digital Technologies curriculum that teachers’ organisations have criticized as too focused on computational thinking.